The Brazen Age New York City and the American Empire Politics Art and Bohemia

Nonfiction

'The Brazen Historic period,' past David Reid

Credit... Berenice Abbott/Museum of the Metropolis of New York

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, nosotros earn an affiliate commission.

• Apr 29, 2016

THE BRAZEN AGE
New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia
By David Reid
Illustrated. 504 pp. Pantheon Books. $thirty.

Between the stop of Globe War 2 and the kickoff of the Korean War, bracing incertitude divers American lives. Merely time would answer the dire questions that loomed. Would the labor market blot millions of demobilized soldiers equally armed services product footing to a halt? (It would.) Would the fate of humankind afterward Hiroshima hang on earth governance, equally its strident advocates insisted? (It would not.) Could Communists remain Communists? (Hardly.) How quickly and easily would things amend for African-­Americans? (Alas.) Might the feminist triumphs of Greenwich Village endure and spread? (Not if Marlon Brando and Norman Mailer had anything to do with it.) Would Ernest Hemingway write another masterpiece? (The jury remains out to this day.)

Gore Vidal christened these five years of jittery open-endedness "not also brazen an age," and David Reid, with Vidal as muse, has written their history and centered information technology on New York Metropolis. He has besides composed a half-century chronicle of European and American bohemia and politics, and the narrower account abides inside the wider one. Reid visits the New York of Charles Dickens in 1842, the Paris of the 1920s and Ferlinghetti's San Francisco after the war. His narrative ascends to the White Firm and descends to the squalid tenements in which the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven hung sardine tin lids from her ears. The pages of "The Brazen Age" are sprawling, roving, panoramic and omnivorous.

Tugboat men threaten to strike, cutting off coal supplies, crippling the postwar metropolis. Berenice Abbott endows photographs of New York with the haunted austerity of Eugène Atget's Paris. William Holden reads T. S. Eliot'due south "Gerontion" atop a movie studio in Queens. Europeans, displaced by war, curiosity and despair at the Great White Fashion. Thomas Due east. Dewey, declining a second fourth dimension to win the presidency, curses the fickle farm vote. Truman ­hedges, sputters and blurts his manner to unexpected greatness. Defence force Secretary James V. Forrestal, as paranoid as the Cold War he helps to showtime, tries to hang himself out a hospital window and falls to his death. Salons and political factions form, move headquarters, immigrate and dissolve. John Gunther reports that on one Midtown block in 1946 you could buy a Cézanne, a chukar partridge, a pound of Persian caviar and a copy of The Civil Service Leader. Reid'due south pages, like that block, are blimp with everything: a history of skyscrapers, a tally of Franklin Roosevelt's cocktails, a shard of Truman Capote'southward wit, a litany of acknowledged authors you lot've never heard of only desire to look up. On display is the always amazing brevity of American history. Henry 50. Stimson in one life fights Indian "wars" and oversees the building of the atomic flop. Mary Heaton Vorse, the radical journalist, protests American imperialism in the Philippines in youth and the Vietnam State of war in old age. Studs Terkel, who died in 2008, Grand.C.s a 1947 entrada rally for Henry Wallace. Jackson Pollock and Franklin Roosevelt, a century apart in personal manner, traverse the same Manhattan.

"The Brazen Age" not only tells stories but too channels voices. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin and Albert Parry weigh in ofttimes. In his own prose Reid sounds similar Wilson and Kazin, sharing their capacious curiosity and emulating their stylistic momentum, epigrammatic solemnity and wryness. "The prince had thrown in with the paupers," Reid writes of Roosevelt'due south electoral success. The "famous curving horseshoe of boxes" at the sometime Metropolitan Opera House "enabled onetime money to contemplate itself." To say that the movie palaces of the Jazz Age constitute "the grandest spaces devoted to popular recreation since the baths of Caracalla and Domitian" is to pay homage to Wilson'southward erudition — anachronistic and charming in 2016. Reid calls his text "an interpretive historical essay, generally along erstwhile-fashioned literary and political lines," and so it is.

Scores of small witnesses intermingle with the main ones. Reid, who lives in Berkeley and has previously edited ii books nigh California, becomes a historian of New York's historians, a literary commentator's literary commentator, a gossip'due south gossip. He is willing to sacrifice the forcefulness of a signal to include contradictory eloquence. Sensibility, non argument, organizes many sections. Readers who live for fe theses should probably dip a toe in and run across. But in our current marketplace of ideas, where pivotal singularities sell books — the i event, disease or invention that reputedly changed everything forever — this wide-ranging intensity, free from inflated claims, is refreshing.

So too is a little hagiography. These days, progressive scholars tend to bench the old baby-sit, either to make room for excluded voices or to take the wind out of human sails in general. The running line is that systems and networks, social ­classes and societal configurations, make up one's mind and shape history more than we like to admit, and that underdogs are our last best hope against them. But Reid assumes that people of note act in history, and matter. His embrace of lore is unabashed. For the thousandth time Hemingway tears wide his shirt to brandish a manly tuft to Max Eastman before punching him in the face. However Reid is an equal-opportunity story­teller and a citizen of the 21st ­century. So W.H. Auden exasperates Edmund Wilson "by insisting that Eisenhower was gay, and that he rather fancied him." And the wives of German intellectuals in exile, invisible to a more sexist age, receive attention and sympathy, having to become, nether difficult circumstances, "housemaids, manufactory workers, babysitters," laboring in the needle merchandise, and hawking encyclopedias and baked goods. Social history tin include heroes without devolving to reactionary apologetics.

What, beyond striking vignettes and delectable anecdotes, is "The Brazen Historic period" well-nigh? Reid fully states his argument only one time the narrative has gained the rhetorical force of living actuality. He suggests there is a lot to be gleaned from a historical moment so essentially uncertain. In a brief series of counterfactual paragraphs, Reid teases out, from the evidence of his panorama, alternatives that never came to pass. These include a stronger New Bargain (a full-fledged social democracy) under Henry Wallace, reasonable engagement with the Soviets, an Interstate System less subversive to American cities, a copacetic vision for public housing and federal funding for writers — in brusque, a United States modeled on Northern European lines, never apocalyptically obsessed with Moscow.

A vast array of social and political possibilities exploded from the five boroughs between the 1890s and the late '30s. It narrowed during the war years and collapsed after 1950. "The Brazen Age" understates this familiar truth, just its myriad dramatizations salve the truth from having to be stated much at all. Did the course of events in the United States, starting in the late '40s, have to run as it ran? Even a year ago, earlier the rise of a social democratic candidate for president, the question would have sounded fanciful and moribund. Now information technology sounds but fanciful. Perhaps, down the road, it volition sound nada worse than optimistic, although don't go your hopes up. In any example, the confusion of this campaign year lends particular interest to Reid's history. People living in a time and then conspicuously in search of a thesis should enjoy reading about another such time. Yet the expiration engagement for such interest will probably be long in coming, and "The Brazen Historic period" is bigger than the moment that gives it tang.

duffeyseemusting.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/books/review/the-brazen-age-by-david-reid.html

Share this post